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Responsive COO Shankar Lagudu on Scaling AI Agents, Governance and the Future of Strategic Response Management
Strategic Response Management (SRM) is becoming increasingly complex, altering the entire competitive market’s perspective. Responsive is showing how AI agents can transform deal-making, governance, and enterprise workflows. With over $ 750 billion in opportunities managed, the company has emerged as a global SRM leader.
In this exclusive conversation, Shankar Lagudu, COO & Co-founder of Responsive, shares how enterprises can scale proposals with speed, ensure enterprise-grade trust, and win smarter in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Responsive’s platform manages over $ 750 billion in opportunities. What’s next in your vision for scaling AI in Strategic Response Management?
As enterprises face growing response volumes and complexity, Responsive is focused on transforming Strategic Response Management (SRM) into a true intelligence layer across the organization. Managing $750B+ in opportunities is a milestone—but a key part of our vision includes building AI-powered systems that think, act, and adapt with the user.
Our roadmap includes AI agents that autonomously execute tasks like requirement extraction, document analysis, and executive summary creation. Embedded within everyday tools like Slack, Teams, Word, and Excel, these agents function as proactive teammates, accelerating kickoff and improving response quality.
To ensure trust and transparency, we’ve enhanced generative AI features like our AI Draft and Ask, and introduced TRACE Score™ to validate AI outputs in real time. Our agents also leverage content from internal libraries, SharePoint, Google Drive, and public sources that broaden response coverage and accuracy.
We’re evolving SRM from reactive response into proactive knowledge orchestration, with features like Profile Center and Guided Projects enabling field teams to act independently, at scale. Every innovation is grounded in real-world feedback through our Early Access Program.
Ultimately, Responsive is making SRM a strategic asset that empowers enterprises to win faster, with less friction and more confidence.
With rising compliance and data security concerns, how is Responsive ensuring enterprise-grade trust and governance in AI-powered responses?
Trust, governance, and compliance are foundational to how Responsive designs and deploys AI. As enterprises accelerate AI adoption, we’ve taken a comprehensive, multi-layered approach to ensure responsible use of AI at scale.
First, Responsive AI is built with a human-in-the-loop architecture, ensuring that every response can be reviewed, validated, and traced back to its source. Our proprietary TRACE Score™ brings transparency to every AI-generated response, scoring it in real time for trustworthiness, relevance, accuracy, completeness, and explainability.
We maintain a formal AI governance framework, aligning with global standards such as ISO 23053 and ISO 27001. Customer data is never used to train our models. All responses are generated strictly from pre-approved sources, with role-based access controls, strong encryption, and support for BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) to ensure data confidentiality.
Responsive’s AI agents are configurable to meet specific industry and regional compliance requirements, including SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA, while enabling secure deployment across enterprise platforms like Word, Slack, Teams, Salesforce, and Seismic.
By combining traceability, transparency, and enterprise-ready controls, Responsive gives organizations the confidence to scale AI responsibly without compromising on governance, security, or compliance.'
Proposal management is changing fast — what key market shifts do you see shaping how global enterprises win deals in the next 2–3 years?
We see a fundamental transformation in how global enterprises approach proposals, moving from static tools to intelligent, connected Strategic Response Management platforms.
First, SRM is emerging as a breakout category, extending well beyond RFPs to cover RFIs, DDQs, compliance forms, and more. Enterprises are centralizing response processes to accelerate deal velocity, ensure consistency, and reduce risk.
The second shift is the rise of AI-driven automation and agentic intelligence. Responsive has pioneered embedded AI for over a decade. Our products like AI Draft, Ask, and our suite of AI agents now automate response generation, executive summaries, and content recommendations. With TRACE Score™, we provide objective scoring to ensure transparency and trust in every AI-generated answer.
Third, companies are scaling with self-service tools like Guided Projects and Proposal Builder, empowering field teams to access shared knowledge and seizing new opportunities, while reducing reliance on centralized proposal teams.
Finally, there’s a push toward integration, content governance, and analytics connecting to CRM and enablement platforms, maintaining a single source of truth, and using dashboards to track performance and improve win rates.
These shifts will reward organizations that embrace intelligence, agility, and cross-functional alignment in their pursuit of workflows.
Beyond automation, Responsive is introducing AI agents — what real impact will these bring to enterprises compared to current tools?
Responsive AI agents represent a leap forward from traditional automation by acting as goal-oriented digital teammates, not just task executors. Instead of automating isolated actions, they autonomously manage multi-step tasks across the pursuit lifecycle, analyzing documents, extracting requirements, mapping answers, drafting summaries, and maintaining content libraries. This reduces manual effort, accelerates workflows, and frees teams to focus on strategy and customer engagement.
Seamlessly embedded into enterprise workflows, some Responsive agents meet users where they already work in other essential applications like Slack and Teams, enabling real-time collaboration across departments. Each agent is conversational, context-aware, and designed to deliver measurable improvements in efficiency, compliance, and win rates.
What sets them apart is trust and transparency. Every output is grounded in governed knowledge bases and validated by our TRACE Score™, which measures trustworthiness, relevance, accuracy, completeness, and explainability, making results audit-ready and enterprise-grade.
Enterprises can configure agents for specific compliance needs and deploy them rapidly, often realizing ROI in a short time frame. Early adopters report responding four times faster, submitting significantly more proposals, and achieving higher win rates without adding headcount.
With Agent Studio, organizations can even build custom agents, ensuring that their AI capabilities scale and evolve as business needs change. This positions Responsive AI Agents as true co-executors, helping enterprises win faster, smarter, and with greater confidence.